“ – the dangerous words, the padlocked words, the words that do not belong to the dictionary,
for if they were written there, written out and not maintained by ellipses,
they would utter too fast the suffocating misery of a solitude …”
Jean Genet
Introduction to “Soledad Brother – The Prison Letters of George Jackson”

Pages

Monday, 24 October 2016

Vault - Flash Fiction

Once we were gymnasts. Vaulting, tumbling and scissoring. Our bodies soaring, in defiance of
gravity’s leadenness. Each was the other’s asymmetric bar containing their
flight. Soft landings and angular handholds. Tucking, twisting and pivoting around each’s axis. Contrapuntal convolutions consummately confluent. Heads over heels over hips and all manna in between.

But eventually our mutual routines became routine. Repetitive, rehearsed, rehashed and rote. We became arrhythmic. Hand supination taken for supplication. We floored one another. Me with my fabric ribbons, you with sports ball. You wanted to club me, while I wanted you hanging at the end of a rope. And not even inverted. Each V-sitting at extreme opposite edges of the parallel bars to keep one another at legs' width. Our anatomies reasserted their asymmetricalness to one another on the bars, on the few occasions we made hate, our bodies clashed and collided rather than being cushioned. We flic-flac'd past one another in avoidance. You pommel horsed me, swinging round to keep me at bay or slice me in two. While I lost my balance when straddling the narrow beam of you. The white spray taking leave from your hands was not chalk dust. We stuck the dismount on one another.

"Time After Time"

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Time travelling back from the future to kill someone in the past, in order to change the course of your own history. But when that future is one in which men are emasculated and the assassin is sent back into our own violent times, hilarity ensues...

"A,B&E"

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A moll is unfaithful to her gangster husband and flees in fear of her life. She washes up in Kavos on Corfu, tourist magnet for British youth offering sun, sex, cheap alcohol and a culture clash of ancient and modern. A love-hate letter to your own country written from exile

"Not In My Name"

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Semtex semiology, internet grooming, ID theft by most unreliable of narrators - he who willfully misleads. Is that a siren wailing or bomb-blast tinnitus ?

What political action remains available after marches, petitions and the legislative process have been ridden over roughshod by the Executive? How do you make your voice heard? How do you ensure you shout the loudest? Through the deafening percussion of a bomb, that momentarily silences all else. That takes the very breath of life away.